The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(09-21-2022, 03:13 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(09-21-2022, 10:07 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Unusual events mark a 4T -- and the final events are often just as weird, whether the assassination of Abraham Lincoln or Adolf Hitler offing himself in a fetid cellar. Consensus marks the beginning of the 1T (it will not be any Age of Aquarius!) One part of the consensus is that most of those on the losing side realize that they were wrong. Whether that happens on November 8 of this year or in the 2024 general election, and it looks as if electoral politics is likely to be the measure this time in America, matters little. 2028? If that means another Trump-like figure, then we are in for another wave of political crisis with perhaps the institution of an authoritarian state and vicious deeds by its leadership.      

I would expect 2024 would be the best chance for the fascist Republican Party to take power. They will gain a huge advantage if Biden retires, since the Democratic Party bench is so vacuous and inadequate. Trump may still be able to run, and if Biden is not his opponent and someone like Kamala Harris is nominated, then Trump will win. I don't think the USA could survive such an eventuality. Trump would move quickly to consolidate a new autocracy, but the left wing today and in the USA generally is not competent to stage a revolution. The most that ever happens from the left is demonstrations and riots. That will only play into Trump's hands.

If Trump doesn't run, the Republicans have several prospects. Any one of them could defeat Kamala Harris, but who would win would largely depend on who the candidates and nominees are and what their horoscope scores are. The popular vote indicator gives the Republicans an advantage, so the Democrats would be wise to stick with Biden if he runs. It doesn't look like Landrieu will be in a position to run, and he is the only certain winner. I don't think Gavin Newsom will be ready by 2024, and it would be risky to nominate him then. But he could win in 2028. I suspect if Biden holds onto the presidency in 2024, and completes much of the 4T agenda, then another Democrat (Newsom being the best prospect) could easily succeed him. The early 1T leaders are likely to come from the Party that won the 4T. But a moderate Republican could win later on. Just what Party such presidents might belong to though is unclear. It is by no means certain that the two major parties we have today will survive the 4T after 2029. If the Republicans implode, new Parties will arrive. If the Democrats fail, we could have a one-party autocracy soon.

After the Civil War, the losing side did not admit defeat, and the "bloody shirt" arguments kept elections close. I don't expect the Trumpists to ever admit defeat after the cold civil war or a period of more January 6ths, but we can hope that they gradually fade due to their defeats (if they happen) and demographics.

Trump's ideology has inadequate appeal to new voters who have no connection to MAGA culture. Young adults often run away from it should it infect their parents. MAGA is not good for keeping extended families together, which may itself doom it as MAGA types become increasingly isolated. Entertainment media will of course mock the MAGA cause, which will hasten the demise of MAGA and Trumpism. MAGA-connected politicians will (if all goes as normal politics with electoral minorities well short of deciding Presidential elections or majorities in the House and Senate) become increasingly irrelevant, which ensures their failure. 

I cannot predict how partisan affiliations go through the Saeculum. The current GOP could reject the MAGA types much as it ditched McCarthyism, with the fringe of the GOP finding itself in such extreme groups as the John Birch Society, which has a continuing existence from the 1950's. The fault with that assumption is that the MAGA types have largely purged the moderates so that there might be no Eisenhower-like figure within the GOP to decide that a Supreme Court ruling that recognizes the wrongness of "separate but equal" or lets a McCarthy type implode because McCarthy's bombast has no factual backing. 

I can imagine Democrats developing a Big Tent that includes many conservatives on economics and 'cultural values' in a marriage of convenience intended to relegate MAGA and Trumpism into irrelevancy and harmlessness. Such a Big Tent is unwieldy in a democracy, and I can imagine it rifting once the perception of danger from MAGA/Trumpism vanishes because contradicting interests in the same geographic zone area cannot hold together. The Democratic Party began the last completed Saeculum as a coalition between Big Labor and southern agrarian racists who both had cause to oppose Yankee corporate power while the GOP was still more sympathetic with Southern blacks. Big Business and organized labor in the same part of the country are inherently at odds with each other, and nothing is likely to change that.  

Barack Obama is the model of "How to be President" at the least for adopting some conservative characteristics that once marked the GOP. I can imagine conservatives adopting much of Obama practice to a more pro-business stance and a recognition of religious faith as a cause for good citizenship. In general, conservatives need to recognize that Obama was an above-average President for which one has few objections and that Trump is a monster.     

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We will need pervasive changes in land use just for economic reasons. The quarter-acre lots for single-family housing will need to go if housing is not to be pushed into the zone of astronomical rents for others. Those who have an economic stake in the system have a responsibility to make their contributions to protect the system and to feed the goose that lays the golden eggs. We need a tax code friendly to small business as opposed to shareholders and executives of giant, monopolized corporations. We need to scrap "too big to fail" in favor of the attitude "too corrupt or incompetent to survive". The demise of retail giants such as Sears, K-Mart, and Bon Ton demonstrate the appropriateness of smaller, more community-based small business in retail. The demise of such chain restaurants as Bennigan's, Big Boy, and Perkins'  creates openings for mom-and-pop restaurants that have less bureaucratic toadying.  

Such a smaller is more beautiful policy would certainly be a good part of a shift away from oligarchy and revival of the middle class.[/quote]

Small business is also a stronger basis of community, and if people are to be happy then they must recognize that staying put is a genuine option. The Constitutional system that we have was predicated upon the norm of small business and small-scale farming, as the concentration of economic power (as was so in Germany and Japan from the foundation of the German Empire and the Meiji Restoration to catastrophic defeats for which the tycoons were partially culpable) weakens democracy. Except for racism, America was far more livable when mom-and-pop businesses were the norm in retailing, restaurants, banking, and even manufacturing. Yes. one paid MSLP, but at least 

(1) more of the money circulated locally
(2) merchandising was more attentive to personal needs, so one better liked what one got
(3) what one got wasn't on the fast track from some sweatshop in China to an American landfill
(4) communities did not homogenize as they do (the small town in which I live is best described as a "suburb of nothing"), and communities with populations of 2000 or so could be viable
(5) local institutions from schools to labor unions to churches and civic groups were stronger, so people experienced less alienation
(6) the capitalists class (including corporate bureaucrats) could not so easily buy the political process   

The sixth is the most important of all of these. Neoliberal economics and politics have far too much in common with fascist corporatism for the survival of liberal democracy in America. The ability of the super-rich to buy the political process. Note well that MAGA/Trumpists are textbook examples, almost as a rule of alienation in the extreme.  

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Quote:Until and unless these changes are made, the saeculum as we know it will end. The only thing that will follow will be continual decline. There will be no set time when a 4T can be designated 80 years or so from now; it will be one continuous 4T from 2029 onward, like in Russia from one great war to the next, but there will be no end, unless a rapid recovery happens in Europe or elsewhere, perhaps in 2029, and the USA is conquered and rescued by them. As I see it, this too can only happen at the end of a 4T and extending into the early 1T years, as in post war Europe and Japan in the 1940s or Reconstruction in the late 1860s.

It would be a repressive and freakishly-stale (if less violent) 1T, a suppressed 2T that fails to shake assumptions, and a particularly-depraved 3T. That is one way that a Saeculum can work, and if that is the next one for America it might be a death spiral with America becoming an Evil Empire intent on destroying what freedom exists elsewhere. That could be a near-inverse of World War II in which America is partitioned or at least occupied by recently-hostile powers instead of what happened to Germany, Italy, and Japan after WWII. That could be the "Republic of Gilead", a "Union of Christian and Corporate States", or a Christian-fundamentalist version of Iran.

Bad polities may repress changes that might moderate or improve things, but all that they preserve is the rot that typically bring down the System. That is the warning of Arnold Toynbee.     

I suppose a death spiral could be considered a saeculum, although the first of its kind in Anglo-American history, and such a shame.[/quote]

I would have hated to be a German or Japanese in the aftermath of the Second World War, not so much for the sting of defeat but for knowing that the deeds of leaders to which one had mandatory loyalty had done such horrible things. The war crimes tribunals exposed the horrific barbarity of gangster regimes. The death spiral, should it happen, would lead in the end to rule of America by a criminal syndicate in all but name, most likely during the Crisis Era. Should such ever happen, then the dissolution of whatever America becomes will be a historical necessity. Germany and Japan were and remain nation-states; the United States is not.  

  

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The real crash, which gutted the value of existing assets from before the speculative frenzy, began in 1930 after the so-called "suckers' rally" in which people saw bargains in the stock market and snarfed them up. Then, and only then, did unemployment soar as a recession began and worsened into a full-blown depression. That is when solid investments during the saner part of the 1920's "New Era" boom lost their value. Things started to go back to normal immediately after the 1929 Crash -- but not after the real crash of 1930.

A minor insight -- why do so many market crashes happen in September and October? Investments in the stock market are largely by rich people who, as befits their class, typically send their kids to expensive colleges and boarding schools and withdraw money for that purpose typically in September. Middle-income people do not do that.

I don't see that the crash of Oct 24/Oct 29 was not the turning point. Historians have all said that it was.

It's easy to mischaracterize the end of a speculative boom as a calamity. Speculative booms must fail. They devour assets without creating wealth but instead a delusion of prosperity. The economic activity before the heady speculation was sustainable until the rural crash (a common joke in rural America was "We beat the Crash of '29. We went bankrupt in 1927!") when America was much more rural than it is now. 

Investment in business formation, real-estate development (if sensible and not speculative), and in job-creating plant and equipment creates prosperity. Investment in speculative securities does nothing of the sort. The speculative boom continues until there is no last buyer.   

A minor downturn does not lead to a Crisis Era. The economic meltdown that led to the rise of the Antichrist in Germany destroyed the shaky Weimar Republic essential to the peace of Europe. The critical point was the failure of a big bank in Vienna in 1931 that ruined businesses throughout central Europe, including Germany. Had the economic meltdown ended before that, then  Adolf Hitler might have had to return to his artwork (it would have been adequate for advertising or stage sets; he just couldn't get the human face well). "No Hitler as Fuhrer" means no Holocaust, that the shaky Spanish Republic muddles through, and that if there is a Second World War that it is Stalin's Soviet Union that becomes the "baddies".